ART REVIEW

ART REVIEW; A New Museum As Unconventional As Its Collection

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: May 16, 2003

BEACON, N.Y.—
THE opening of Dia:Beacon on Sunday changes the landscape for art in America. ''Have you seen it?'' people in art circles have been asking each other for months. Now you can.

The museum, the largest one yet for contemporary art, enshrines part of a generation of big-thinking artists in a former Nabisco factory, a building with nearly a quarter of a million square feet of plain exhibition space. The place sprawls beside the Hudson River, a little more than an hour north of New York City.

The artists are European and American, Minimalists, Conceptualists and Post-Minimalists primarily, who came to maturity in the 1960's and 70's. Serialism, geometry and the grid are the leitmotifs of the work. The effect is subdued. The undercurrent, if you look with open eyes, is theatrical, and occasionally even joyous.

Many of these artists were poorly seen or shown only in out-of-the-way places over the years. There are 22 of them, a small, eccentric assortment, reflecting Dia's idiosyncratic roots, shifting priorities and sporadic collecting. Dia:Beacon is not a complete survey of any movement or era. Artists you might presume are here are not. The omission of Carl Andre is glaring. Few artists are presented in any depth. Most are represented by a few works, or just one. All are given room to breathe.

Some look great. Robert Ryman gets a retrospective of white-on-white paintings in three rooms. Fred Sandback's colored string sculptures should come as a revelation to people who don't know his work well enough. The same applies to Michael Heizer's sculptures and Blinky Palermo's paintings. Dia:Beacon makes stars of a few artists who deserve to be.

Others don't look as good. But the museum is clearly worth celebrating. It is a brilliant marriage of art and architecture. All the money has obviously gone into making the building look simple and unobtrusive so that you focus on the art, which is what museums are supposed to do. You admire the light and the atmosphere. The place can make you feel exalted.

The money, and much of the inspiration for it comes from Leonard Riggio, Dia's chairman. The artist Robert Irwin and the architectural firm Open Office collaborated with Michael Govan, Dia's director, and Lynne Cooke, its curator, on the renovation of the building. Mr. Riggio, Mr. Govan and Ms. Cooke deserve credit for the audacity, in a bad economy, to realize a gigantic museum about the accomplishments of a generation of artists who are not particularly popular but whose influence has been significant and generally underrepresented elsewhere.

How to measure influence? By the 1960's, European art was shaped for the first time, to a significant degree, by what artists were doing in the United States. The traffic of influence flowed from here to there as it hadn't before. These were not initially Dia's artists who made an impact. They were other artists who came to maturity during that same crucial decade between 1958 and 1968, when American art meant Pop, then Minimalism and Post-Minimalism. Before then, Europeans intermittently acknowledged what was happening here. Older artists like de Kooning showed at the Venice Biennale in 1954 but Europeans didn't pay particular notice. During the mid-1950's the influence of Pollock on French artists like Soulages, Fautrier and the group called Art Informel, highly debatable at best, was only marginally noteworthy anyway.

But by the late 1950's, the situation began to change. Pollock was already dead and Jasper Johns was in the Venice Biennale. One generation had been followed by another in America, although Europeans now often lumped the two together -- Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko with Johns, Twombly and Rauschenberg -- because all of them crowded the scene there, more or less simultaneously.

Their reception was not entirely good. But they were noticed. And quickly they were followed by Warhol and Lichtenstein, then in the late 60's by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt, whose connections with, and influences on, European artists like Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Bernd and Hilla Becher and Blinky Palermo constitute Dia's trans-Atlantic narrative.

Europeans who disliked the American invasion, and many did, sometimes equated Minimalism with American industrial and corporate power. It was the Vietnam era. That perception has lingered, misleadingly. The art can be forbidding. But it can also be delicate. Notwithstanding its use of fluorescent tubes and stainless steel, Minimal art exalted finish and precise, one-of-a-kind refinements, an approach that had little to do with the assembly line. Judd endorsed small enterprise and the poetry of plainspoken materials, not mass production. The patronage model was also European. Heiner Friedrich, Dia's founder, arrogantly or not, wanted Dia to emulate the Medicis.

Artists younger than Judd, like Mr. Heizer and Robert Smithson, then embraced heavy machinery. They moved dirt with bulldozers and blew up rocks with explosives. As Kirk Varnedoe puts it, this partly expressed the ''romance of the new left for the old left,'' a 60's blue-jeans dream of reconciling ''longhairs with hardhats.'' It was an urbane aesthetic of denial and detritus, making stripped-down art from scraps of rubber, rocks and broken glass. It entailed nostalgia for a bygone industry: the equation of working class labor with moral strength.